Slow burn of embarrassment

“As I get older, I want life to slow down a little. Films move too fast. I want to stay in the moment and, if you wait, things reveal themselves.” The film maker is Joanna Hogg and she is talking about her latest film Unrelated which I really loved despite it being a little too long.

Her film is a real achievement given that the main character Anna (Kathryn Worth) is annoying, embarrassing and dumb. Most of the time, I felt irritated with her. A middle aged English woman, she arrives at an Italian villa near Sienna late at night to be greeted by her friend’s daughter and her friends. They are drinking by the pool; the adults have gone to bed. The early part of the film sets up her unease and the fact that she and her absent husband are going through a rocky patch. Anna has been invited to be part of this holiday for this extended family and friends but she seems incapable of connecting with Verena, her friend and gravitates towards the younger generation who are in their late teens or early twenties. The whole extended generational mix reminded me of being at the beach house and of the sort of tensions which arise when you plonk a whole lot of people in the one place for too long an d fuel it with alcohol.

Hogg said in an interview that she deliberately organised the film shoot so that all the actors had to commit to being in the house for about 7 weeks. She shot it consecutively so that the story could emerge organically. Looking at this house and environment, it would be no real hardship to be forced to spend a couple of months there but tensions arise when you live in close proximity to other people for any length of time.

Anna is attracted to Oakley; there are many scenes where I felt the slow burn of embarrassment for her. It was painful to watch but very real. I am most interested in the questions of allegiances in this film. You can watch a trailer which shows the Gen Y kids buying (mostly) alcohol from the supermarket. Anna is trailing along behind with an uncertain look on her face like she’s not really sure if she fits in. (She’s not really sure if she fits in anywhere.) They hoon out to the car with the shopping trolleys and end up in a field smoking a joint. The kids (I know I should write young adults but this denotes my age) boast about getting pissed and rolling round Sienna in the middle of the night pissing on church doors, while Anna looks sort of embarrassed and sort of complicit. Then a silence falls over the group as they realise that she is “not one of them”. “Hey, don’t tell the olds.” And she agrees and that sets up the dramatic tension for a large amount of the film.

We would have liked to have seen more of the olds in the film. Slightly too much time is taken up trailing round after the kids and apart from Anna, the older generation remains largely one-dimensional. But Naomi and I both loved the tag line between Anna and Verena; an awkward and uncomfortable “Hey, let’s get a couple of tickets to an Iggy Pop concert some time.” Which sort of tells us that Anna is still in a pretty ungrounded space, despite what has happened to her in the close confines of this house.